Earnest Bledsoe

On November 14, 2008, police in Houston, Texas arrested 26-year-old Earnest Bledsoe and charged him with possession of a controlled substance after they seized powder from him that field-tested positive for cocaine.

Three days later, on November 17, 2008, Bledsoe pled guilty in Harris County Criminal District Court and was sentenced to 60 days in the Harris County Jail.

In 2015, the Harris County District Attorney’s Conviction Review Section learned that the Houston Police Department Crime Laboratory tested the substance in April 2010 and no drugs were found.

The prosecution notified Bledsoe’s attorney and joined in the filing of a state petition for a writ of habeas corpus in June, 2015 requesting that the conviction be vacated. In July 2015, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted the petition and vacated the conviction. On August 26, 2015, the prosecution dismissed the charge.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.

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We welcome new information from any source about exonerations already on our list and about cases not in the Registry that might be exonerations.